Harun Yahya’s Religious Message between Local Decline and Global Success:

What Is Islamic in (his) “Islamic Creationism”?

Stefano Bigliardi - Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Lund University)Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Santa Fe, Mexico City

International CESNUR – ISSNR ConferenceTHE VITALITY OF NEW RELIGIONS: THINKING

GLOBALLY, EXISTING LOCALLY

Waco, Texas, 4-7 June 2014

The George W. Truett Theological Seminary -

Baylor University

A research project blending philosophy of science,philosophy of religion and Islamology

(method: text analysis & interviews)

1 – Who is Adnan Oktar/Harun Yahya?

Local decline and global success

2 – Harun Yahya’s “philosophy of nature”

3 – Beyond “Islamic Creationism”: possible reasons of a global success

Who are Adnan Oktar and Harun Yahya?

Creationism has gone global and, in the Muslim world, it is mainly associated with one pen-name:

Harun Yahya.

Behind this pseudonym, that evokes the Prophets Aaron and John,

is a whole enterprisewhose public face is the Turkish writer,

religious leader, and TV personality

Adnan Oktar

(b. 1956, Ankara)

Adnan Oktar• He studied philosophy and interior architecture design.• Anti-Darwinist preacher Influenced by Said Nursi (1878-1960).• 1986: accusation of promoting a theocratic revolution – 19 months in

jail.• He managed to gather around himself a group of students from well-off

families. Such group gradually took on the form of a sect, whoseactivities and internal dynamics repeatedly raised the attention ofTurkish authorities.

• 1990: he founded the Scientific Research Foundation. The Foundationfor Protection of National Values followed in 1995.

• Legal troubles: hospitalization in a psychiatric institution - severalimprisonments and indictments for possession of cocaine, sexualharassment, blackmailing of collaborators.

Adnan Oktar• He makes no mystery about his troubles. In interviews and

presentations on his websites he is described as extraordinary andoutstandingly devout. His troubles are either the result of the occultagencies or God’s tests.

• Over the past two years Oktar has intensified his initiatives anddiversified his contributions as an opinion-maker. He runs andappears on a television channel (A9). He sits with men and womenwhose beauty he emphatically praises, discussing politics and worldaffairs.

• Must have powerful enemies and friends alike (cf. his battle againstRichard Dawkins, 2008).

• A new version of Islam: technological, modern, liberal…

Harun Yahya

(I am more interested in HY. Adnan Oktar’s life is part and parcel of Yahya’s narrative.)

Harun Yahya's productivity is outstanding. Up to and including fall 2013,almost 300 books in Turkish have been published under his name, morethan 200 of which have been translated into English.

Yahya’s articles in Turkish listed on his official website number morethan 2000 and his English publications reach approximately 1500.Translations are available in sixty languages, all widely advertisedthrough more than 150 constantly updated websites.

Oktar is unlikely to have written (and read) all of Yahya's works. Theiroriginal nucleus is produced by a team whereas the translations arecommissioned to, or more probably spontaneously carried out by,sympathizers the world over.

The Atlas of Creation

In 2007 Yahya sent the gigantic and luxurious first tome of his Atlas ofCreation (768 glossy pages, 5.4 kg, 27,5 x 37,5 cm, images in lenticularprinting on the hard cover that create an illusion of motion), unsolicitedand free of charge, to natural science teachers, research institutions, andlibraries throughout Europe and North America.

The second tome followed in 2013.

Harun Yahya’s Message• Darwinian evolutionist doctrines are the source of all the violent and repressive phenomena

of the last century such as terrorism and totalitarianisms (communism and fascism alike), allrejected on a par with racism, romanticism, capitalism, Buddhism, and Zionism (which after aflirt with Holocaust denial in the Nineties to date he explicitly distinguishes from Judaism).

• He claims that they received constant support throughout the millennia by freemasonry,whose agency he describes as the principal occult actor of history in all its anti-religiousmanifestations.

• Yahya sees in Darwin the major advocate of evolutionism, however he claims as well thatevolutionist doctrines date back even to ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

• Yahya rejects Darwinism following a double-track criticism: on the one hand he points out itsmoral consequences, whose disastrous effects he envisages in history. On the other hand heclaims that Darwinism lacks scientific proof.

• Yahya endorses an ecumenical and messianic form of Islam based on a return to religiousvalues which have its symbols and examples in the Prophets. The time of the coming of a lastprophet or Mahdi is near; he will appear and begin his activity in Turkey. This Mahdi is verysimilar to Oktar.

• Yahya regards all the features and elements of the universe as clear proofs of the existence ofGod. According to Yahya everything in the universe is necessary, which means necessarilymade for human life and, conversely, necessarily pointing at the existence of God.

Harun Yahya’s Global Success

• Despite Oktar’s dubious reputation in his home country, hisextravagant TV appearances, and the shortcomings of his/Yahya’sbooks from a scholarly point of view, Yahya still enjoys worldwiderespect by readers who are either unaware of his whimsicality or donot give any importance to it.

• In 2010, Yahya was selected among the top 500 most influentialMuslims by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Jordan.

• Considering the ambition expressed by the initiative of sending outthe tomes of the Atlas of Creation to institutions all over the world,and the general appeal of all such discussions to different audiences, itseems safe to assume that the most relevant aspect (that is, the onemost likely to endure and to entice a global audience) of Yahya’sproduction is his creationism.

The reasons of a global success• The stylistic features of his works.

(1) God’s existence (and hence faith) are taken as the object of a structured,“rational” argumentation within which proofs are given and discussed.

(2) The books are written in a style that mimics scientific popularization with, forinstance, quotations from scientists, usage of schemata and “data,” footnotes(albeit incomplete ones), and so forth.

(3) The discussion targets the famous (and famously connected to science)doctrine of Darwinism as its antagonist; it is apparently discussed on a footingof equality with experts by criticizing it, offering “proofs,” asking forcounterproofs, and so on.

(4) Yahya takes proofs as the “facts” of the “natural world” that are presented aswhat natural sciences examine or are constituted of. Such “facts” fuse, andpractically end up coinciding with, the graphic representation of facts thatconstitute a “hyper-reality” in which the verbal discussion is literally inscribed.The pictures are doctored and assembled in order to enhance their visualappeal. The beauty with which they are then conceptually associated in theverbal part of the discourse becomes itself a “fact” that is used as a “proof.”

Common strategies in marketing/ new religions’ PR

• Scientific-sounding advertisements: cf. shampoo advertisedreferring to its “pH”.

• Jehovah’s Witnesses propose a “biblical study”: a religiousmessage is presented with the credentials of a scholarly,objective discipline.

• The Raelians’ website hosts a page of scientific news proving tobe “science friendly” and scientifically updated.

• Scientology hijacks science’s prestige from its very name andtries to gain prestige while antagonizing psychiatry.

• A visual hyper-reality is a common marketing strategy: all themagazines devoted to scientific popularization count on thevisual appeal of the “facts” they represent to sell more copies

• Jehovah’s Witnesses: enticing pictures of nature and theuniverse.

What is Islamic in HY’s creationism?

Islam influences some thematic and stylistic devices in Yahya'soverall production (usage of Qur’anic verses, reference to theMahdi, specific narratives) and some modes of productionconcerning Yahya's visual hyper-reality– for instance, a directrepresentation of God is not allowed.

Yet the presence of Islamic elements has to be considered in thecontext of, and compared with, other elements of such a message.An inspection of the Atlas reveals that Islamic/Qur'anic referencesand narratives are diluted and rather marginal.

As I see it, Islam ends up providing an extrinsic garb in whichYahya’s religious message about God and nature is wrapped. Inother words, Islam is not constitutive of Yahya’s message’s innerlogic - that is, the scientification of a religious message.

Conclusions

• Yahya’s appeal should be taken as indicative of some culturaldynamics. Relevant in such dynamics is of course the way in whichbiological evolution is taught, perceived, and discussed.

• The fact that Yahya can find so many sympathisers points at someobjective difficulties in understanding and popularizing not justbiological evolution but, more generally, natural science. It is parasiticon “the unnatural nature of science,” the non-commonsensical (andtherefore easily misunderstood or misrepresented) method andobject of science; with science's prestige all are exploited in a media-savvy way.

• It can also be asked whether such discourse is really harmful for thepromotion and development of science in (Muslim) societies orwhether it rather fills a natural gap by creating a reassuring messagefor a scientifically illiterate or semi-literate audience.

Thank you! – Any questions?

Further reading

DEAN, Cornelia. 2007. “Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World” The New YorkTimes, July 17, 2007; available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17book.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

EDIS, Taner. 2008. “Harun Yahya's Legal Troubles”, 2008 Reports of the National Center for Science Education (RNCSE) 28:3 pp. 4-5; available at http://ncse.com/rncse/28/3/harun-yahyas-legal-troubles

ELLIOTT, Joel. 1999. “You Can Live Forever on a Paradise Earth. The Visual Rhetoric of Jehovah's Witness Iconography” Available at: http://www.unc.edu/~elliott/icon.html

HAMEED, Salman. 2009. “The Evolution of Harun Yahya's "Atlas of Creation"” available at:http://www.irtiqa-blog.com/2009/02/evolution-of-harun-yahyas-atlas-of.ht

HARDA, Halil. 2009. “Sex, Flies and Videotape: the Secret Lives of Harun Yahya” New Humanist, 124, (5); available at: http://newhumanist.org.uk/2131/sex-flies-and-videotape-the-secret-lives-of-harun-yahya

HOWARD, Damian A. 2011. Being Human in Islam. The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview.

London and New York: Routledge.

NUMBERS, Ronald L. 2006(2). The Creationists. From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, 2006(2) Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press.

RANDERSON, James. 2008. “Creationist Challenges Dawkins” The Guardian, Tuesday 19 August 2008; available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/aug/19/richarddawkinsisusedto

RIEXINGER, Martin. 2008. “Propagating Islamic Creationism on the Internet” Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology vol. 2, no. 2; available at: http://www.digitalislam.eu/article.do?articleId=1980

ROSS SOLBERG, Anne. 2013. The Mahdi Wears Armani. An Analysis of the HarunYahya Enterprise. Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola.

SCHNEIDER, Nathan. 2009. “Evolving Allah. Can One Man Succeed in Stirring Up the Muslim World Against Darwin?” Search, March-April 2009; available at:http://www.docstoc.com/docs/42950056/EVOLVING-ALLAH

WOLPERT, Lewis. 1992. The Unnatural Nature of Science. London: Faber & Faber.

…and also:

BIGLIARDI, Stefano: (2014) Islam and the Quest for Modern Science.Conversations with Adnan Oktar, Mehdi Golshani, Mohammed Basil Altaie,Zaghloul El-Naggar, Bruno Guiderdoni and Nidhal Guessoum. Foreword by LeifStenberg. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (Series Transactions).